Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 592 - Andrew Huberman, How To Stay Calm, Focus Better & Be Happier

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Fired off another quick podcast with Andrew Huberman discussing how to stay calm, how to focus better, how to live happier and the importance of expanding your view. Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Magic Spoon Cereal: https://www.magicspoon.com/powerproject to automatically save $5 off a variety pack! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT15 for 15% off ALL LABS! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz

Power Project family, you know how much we talk about sleep on this podcast. A lot. Because sleep is one of the biggest things that you need for muscle gain, fat loss. I can't leave your cravings. You need good quality sleep. And that's why we are super pumped to be partnering with an amazing sponsor, 8Sleep. Now, 8Sleep is a mattress company that has something called the Pod Pro and the Pod Pro Cover.

Okay, this is a cover that regulates the temperature of the mattress. So you can actually sleep cool. And they've done a lot of research showing that people that sleep on the eight sleep mattresses actually fall asleep 32% faster. But the great thing too, people, we over here at The Power Project are hot sleepers. And what I mean is that we sweat. We have many times in our old mattresses woken up in a puddle of our own liquids being sweat. And let me tell you, that has not once happened in this eight sleep mattress because it keeps you cool while you sleep, which helps you get better restful quality sleep. Andrew, tell them more about it. Absolutely.

Yeah. So and then another thing also is if you sleep with a partner and they maybe don't run as hot as you, you actually have dual temperature zones. So I can set mine extremely cold. My wife can set hers not as cold, but still cool. And that really is like that in and of itself is like, it's so helpful. And especially again, like I said, when you sleep with a partner, they're happy, you're happy. You both wake up extremely happy. Everyone's happy. You got to head over to eight sleep.com slash power project. That's eight spelled out. So E I G H T sleep.com slash power project and you guys will receive 150 off your

pod pro mattresses again eight sleep.com slash power project links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes head over there right now have i gotten hurt besides the uh yeah yeah i've gotten hurt a bunch of times i I tore, I tore both my biceps. I tore a tricep. I tore a hamstring and a tour pack. Uh, I definitely hurt my back a bunch of times. I hurt my back.

Like, like what I'm dealing with now, like a little bit of, yeah. And, uh, I actually started to become so intuitive with some of these injuries. I was like, oh, that's a two-weeker.

You know, this is going to take two weeks to recover from. Or this one's going to take one week to recover from. What I found interesting was sometimes I would get really wrecked. And I was like, oh, that's it. I'm done. I thought I'd be done. There's been times where I could... There was actually one time in particular where I couldn't even lay down in my own bed.

Oh, geez. And it was from something that I don't even recall happening. Like I just trained that day and I must have jarred something loose or whatever. And I just couldn't even lay down in my bed. How did you get in the bed? Did you just timber? Yeah, I just kind of like fell into my bed and I'm like, I'm stuck here. And then, I don't know, two, three days later, it's all good.

Anyway, we're going to talk about habits. We're going to dive right into it because we're going to make this a little bit of a shorter show. If you got questions, you want to prompt them where to ask the questions, how to do it. So yeah, TikTok. If you guys do have questions on other marks or mine, click that question, question mark with the question box. Okay.

And ask a question there. We'll probably be able to get to two of your questions. So the best ones will get picked. Andrew Huberman. So guys take advantage of it today. We're talking about habits and, you know, it's not easy for people to form good habits.

I think sometimes we get into these states of mind that are compromised, maybe by our interpretation of the things around us. But maybe we don't even recognize that we're interpreting these things to be negative and then we're attaching negative emotions to it. You do a lot of work with virtual reality stuff. And what I noticed being somebody that tries to live my life in equanimity and tries to keep it cool as soon as I put those glasses on, as soon as I put that headset on for virtual reality and walked on a bench

press pad that was flat on our turf in the gym, I immediately, you know, crouched down like I was being shot at by somebody. As soon as I started looking around this virtual world, I'm somebody that thinks I have good control and good agency over what's going on around me. And in that moment, I didn't.

And it gave me perspective because I was like, you know what? Maybe this is the way a lot of other people feel when they're stuck in being a lot heavier than they want to be, or they're stuck in just having bad habits aside from maybe addiction to drugs or something like that. But when you're stuck in these bad habits and you're stuck in this kind of perpetual way of kind of seeing the world and you're thinking that everything around you is so scary or fearful that you're scared to even take a step. And here's some of the footage of it.

Oh, yeah. We have something similar in our lab, but we'd be recording from your brain. Oh, jeez. Oh, no. And I wouldn't be able to lie about how I felt about it, right? Well, you could lie, but we'd know you're lying. Right. No, we wouldn't actually know you're lying necessarily,

but we do actually rely on what people tell us about how they feel, but we're recording heart rate, breathing, brain signals if we can, and we have you do some challenging tasks while in different states of alertness and fear. How do we, with the different things swirling around us, how do we work on continually making steps in the right direction and making the best decision possible. Yeah, so one of the incredible features of our nervous system and life really is this, what we call the dynamic aperture of the mind,

which is really just a fancy way of saying that we can have a big picture view or a small picture view, and that all starts with vision. You know, I think we can simplify this issue of what's the brain, what's the mind by just what's concentration, what's focus, what's the aperture. Let's make it really simple.

If you are really alert, excited or stressed, your visual world constricts. You get a soda straw view of the world. You're looking at things through like a small tunnel. And when you're relaxed, your visual world opens up tremendously. You can see the whole picture. And that's spatial aperture, but there's also time aperture. You mentioned this being like actual, like literal, right?

Like I've heard you refer to this as putting your phone in portrait mode, that your eyes actually do that when you are under duress, right? Yeah. And when you're excited. So you get much better at visualizing one thing and much poorer at visualizing the big picture. You literally lose the forest through the trees. And this is because of a process in the eye called accommodation, where the lens of your eye, like typical lenses, like of glasses, it's actually bendy. It can move. And so when you are excited or stressed, you see the micro movements, the micro details of what you're looking at. Also, when you're excited or stressed, you frame rate, you slice time very finely. So a couple of ways to think about this. Let's take a negative example. First, you're trying to catch a plane. You're stressed. The person in front of you is slow

and it seems like it takes forever. Your frame rate on time is much finer than when you're relaxed. Let's take the opposite thing. You get up, you're tired. The world's coming in. It's text messages, emails. It's Mark. You got gotta be here, we're starting in 15 minutes, and whoa, your frame rate is slow, and the world seems like it's going by really, really fast. So this is also true when you're in sleep, space and time are very fluid, but when you're awake, it's either fast frame rate

or slow frame rate or anywhere in between. You can learn to adjust your frame rate by changing the way literally that you view the world. So if you are stressed, we talked on a different podcast about doing the double inhale, long exhale, the physiological size. So that'll start to calm you down. But also it's a good idea when you're stressed is to expand your visual field. You can do this. So we're looking at each other right now. So I'm looking at SEMA, but I can also see Mark and see some people in the periphery. I can see the ceiling, the floor. I'm now dilating my field of view. Okay. When you do that, you actually adjust your

frame rate in a way that's calming to your nervous system. And sometimes you can't do the breathing. I just did because it looks ridiculous or because you're speaking or because you just simply can't. And so the visual change that you can make of dilating your field of view is completely covert. You don't know where I'm looking right now. You know I'm looking at you because my head and eyes are pointed at you,

but you don't know if I'm paying attention to Mark or not. And so this is really good to do in all circumstances where you want to have a calmer state of mind. Now that really soda straw view is essential. It's really good at getting you to really laser in and, you know, focus on a lift or focus on something. But unless you're doing that, chances are you should be in more panoramic field of view. So when you take your walks, getting into a panoramic field of view, So when you take your walks, getting into a panoramic field of view, just this is wide field is panorama, is just you're not moving your head around like this,

but you know, the world's going by, that's relaxing you too. It's going to reset you. So state of mind is key. And oftentimes when our state of mind isn't where we want it to be, we feel trapped in bad habits. We feel trapped in bad loops.

I always say when your mind isn't where you want it to be, use your body to shift your mind. Don't try and control the mind with the mind. It's like trying to grab fog. It's really tough. Once you're in a calmer place, then you can start to reason through things. So just thinking about your thoughts

for a lot of folks may not be enough. It's tough to do at the extremes. It's great to do, right? We should all be reflective, right? Not everything is about moving the body, but when your mind, when you're troubled or you're stressed, or I would encourage anyone,

if you get a comment on social media, that's triggering before you respond, you need to get your eyes out of that little box and in someplace else. Now you'll notice that your mind will loop like that person. I'm like, I want to, you know, but remember there are billions of comments online. They might've already moved on to doing that to somebody else. Right. But how do you get that perspective? We're

talking about gaining perspective. It's very hard to do when you're stressed. What you need to do is take a walk and expand your field of view. But now if you're taking a walk and you're checking your phone every two seconds to see who they are and what they're about, you're going down that tunnel. You're the aperture of your mental world is constricting. So having that wide field aperture is essential. I always say, unless you're trying to help someone who's in a grave state of physical danger, chances are stopping and expanding your field of view is going to serve you all better, right? I mean, if it's an emergency, right?

Someone's hemorrhaging blood and you need to stop that up. Well, by all means, stay stressed, handle that. But if there's something that's upsetting, you need to expand your field of view. And by doing that, you expand your time dimensionality. So you start thinking, the brain starts analyzing not just what's happening right now, but also past information, prior things mixed with future, all that. You know, we always, you see all these crazy slogans

and memes online, like, you know, if it doesn't, you know, if it's not going to matter a year from now, you know, ignore it or something. Very easy to read and understand what they're trying to say. Very hard to do in the moment. Very, very hard. And that's because of this aperture, this shrinking of our mental state. So you have to counter that. And the best way to counter that is with vision. Power Project Familia, how's it going? Now, if you're like us,

whether you're dieting or you're health conscious, a lot of us don't like to go off plan. And if you do go off plan, you don't want to make bad choices that are going to take you off your diet. So for example, we all love cereal, but if you eat cinnamon toast crunch, the taste you can see, you'll also get a lot of unnecessary carbohydrates and sugar, and it's just not good. But that's why we've partnered with our new sponsor, Magic Spoon. Now Magic Spoon is amazing because number one, it's protein rich cereal. Give me the macros on this. Zero grams of sugar, four grams of net carbs, 14 grams of protein per serving, and 140 total calories per serving.

Not only that, but they also have amazing flavors, four of which are frosted, cocoa, fruity, and peanut butter. These things really taste good, and it actually tastes like good cereal, not cardboard. So, if you guys want to indulge without falling off plan, check out Magic Spoon. Andrew, how can people get it? Yes, absolutely. You guys got to head over to magicspoon.com slash power project. When you guys go there, you're going to see the variety pack. And those are the four flavors that Nsema just mentioned. And when you go to that link, you can save $5 off of that variety pack and what's really really amazing about magic spoon is they offer a 100 happiness guarantee so if you guys aren't ecstatic to have this cereal

let them know and they'll give you a full refund links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes head over there and start enjoying cereal again and you were saying on a previous podcast i heard you talk about like kind of lateral eye movement, moving your eyes back and forth. So as you're walking, are you kind of looking out of the corner of your eye, kind of going back and forth or returning our head? What's that look like? Okay. So there's a process called eye movement desensitization reprocessing, which it looks crazy, but I'll do it since I'm the one talking about it. it since I'm the one talking about it. Basically, moving the eyes from side to side like this has been shown to reduce the activity of the amygdala, one of the primary threat detection fear centers

in the brain. When I first heard about this stuff, I thought it was crazy. I thought someone crazy made this up. There's no neuroscience to support that. But actually, there's some imaging studies to support that eye movements of that sort actually do suppress the amygdala, make people feel calmer, less fearful. And when you walk, you naturally do this with your eyes. So you don't have to move your head from side to side. Just as long as you have optic flow going by, your eyes are reflexively doing some of this. Eyes do have to be open. It's not up and down.

If people are visually impaired, if there are any blind folks listening to this, then they know how to do that actually with their hearing, panoramic hearing versus cone of attention with hearing. Blind people are very good at doing this. But for most people who are sighted, moving your eyes from side to side for 10 to 30 seconds is going to calm you down. And this makes really good sense because from an evolutionary perspective and adaptive perspective, we've always been confronted with threats, interpersonal threats, animal to human threats. Forward movement is the way that you suppress the fear response. Typically we think about freezing and backing up,

though that happens, but then the fear response just tends to increase actually. So you don't want to do anything stupid, but if you're trying to move forward in a challenge, move your eyes from side to side. I will do this sometimes when I feel like I have to get out and run and I'm feeling lazy. I always think, Oh, maybe I need more coffee. I mean, maybe I need to increase my amount of energy, but sometimes it's not just about level of activation and energy. Sometimes it's really just about having too much anxiety for some reason. I'm not a particularly anxious person, but sometimes you just have too much energy in your system and it's all discombobulated. This can also put you in that really ideal state of mind, which is alert but calm.

I always say alert but calm is great for most things. It's not great for a 1,080-pound squat, but it's great for most times of day. You guys actually have always struck me as very calm people. So, you know, you don't seem like somebody who's very reactive, Mark. You either seem, yeah, but some people are reactive, right? They wake up in the morning, they're stressed, they're angry, they're tired. You know, a lot of people feel that way. So this is the first place you start with making better habits? I think starting with physiology, yeah.

Learn to take some control of your internal state. Double inhale, exhale to calm down. So two inhales through the nose, long exhale through the mouth. Learn the relationship between eye movements and getting calm. Learn to increase the aperture of your visual world and notice where your mind goes. Those are big ones in terms of learning how to steer your nervous system. These are the steering wheel accelerator and brake of your nervous system. I'm curious about this because we were talking about it a little bit when we were working out.

But you mentioned that when you were younger that you didn't have the best ability to focus. And nowadays you sit down for hours on end reading study after study, research after research. And it's just, just interesting seeing who you are now versus who you were before. I think a lot of people have a problem focusing these days and they're trying to figure out, do I have ADD? Like, am I not able, is that just not something I'm going to be able to do? With a lot of people struggling with that, what are some practical things that they can start to try to implement so that they can increase their ability to focus on single tasks at that moment in time? Yeah.

Well, the phone is definitely detrimental to this because you have so many contexts within your phone. I mean your phone is showing you 50 – with the equivalent of like 50 television shows in 10 seconds. So flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. Maybe not 10 seconds. 20 seconds. say, you know, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, maybe not 10 seconds, 20 seconds. But, um, you know, the brain will follow the visual system in so many ways. So if you really want to enhance your ability to focus, put the phone away for two minutes, literally two minutes, just put it across the room or in another room, sit down, pick a point on the wall and just try and relax,

Pick a point on the wall and just try and relax. Breathe however you want while maintaining visual focus for 120 seconds on a location. You can blink if you want to. If you don't need to blink, don't blink because actually every time you blink, you reset your time perception. Blinks are like a curtain in a play or it's like a scene clapper for movies. But just sit there and try and extend the amount of time that you can focus. And again, you can blink. What you'll find is it's incredibly boring and agitating,

like most things you need to focus on and have a hard time focusing on. So we all can focus much better on things we really, really enjoy. But just a little bit of focus training for two, three minutes every once in a while will teach you to recognize when you have that impulse to get up and move or suddenly jump to another activity. And what you'll find is that it carries over to a really terrific ability to read, to study, to listen. And you start to notice those internal signals, like why the urgency to move?

Why the urgency to go away? Well, maybe the conversation's no good and you want to get away. That's fine. That's a different matter. But there's something you need to do and you don't want to do it or you can't focus. It's fine to think about hydration, food, caffeine.

That's great. But chances are you just haven't really taught your brain how to focus. So start with your visual focus and then let your mental focus follow that. I still do this for a couple minutes each day. I'll go outside. I'll take a walk, which is no focus, everything just walking by.

And then I'll finish by instead of looking at my phone, I'll try and just pick a point. People probably think I'm pretty strange if they see me doing this. Just pick a point and look at that point for a short while. And then I'll just sort of notice, huh, that was actually a lot harder than you might think. But I do believe that part of being a functional adult, being a high-functioning person in any domain of life, is being able to control your impulses to do something different.

And you see this in the gym, actually. This is another place you could do this. So have you ever done this where you set, probably you guys haven't, but you set out to do, let's say, a set of curls. You're like, okay, I place you could do this. So have you ever done this where you said, probably you guys haven't, but you set out to do, let's say a set of curls. You're like, okay, I'm going to do, I'm going to do alternating dumbbell curls, right? And then at some point you switch to doing them simultaneous. And then you see people switching and doing them alternate.

Now there's nothing wrong with doing that. And I know that freestyling things can be very beneficial going by feel, but sometimes, and for some people sticking to a regimen is actually what they need to learn how to do. And the gym is a great place to learn how to do that. So having a plan and sticking to that plan, even if it's uncomfortable, is its own form of exercise independent of the physical training that you're doing. Does that make sense? And following a plan and following a schedule can help the release of dopamine as well. Like when you stick to your diet, you go off your diet, you can get hit with dopamine because you ate ice cream, right? But you can also get hit with

dopamine. And I think you might even get hit with more of it when you stay on point. Absolutely. But I think that's hitting milestones, hitting goals after. So anytime there's pain, the pleasure you're going to experience after that is much greater. Because again, I have to give credit to Anna Lemke's book, Dopamine Nation. She talks about this. If you're getting to the ice bath, for instance, cold water, there's always a wall getting in. So I always think that's the first wall. Then let's say you've never done ice bath. The second wall generally comes at about 30 seconds.

So your goal that day is just to get past that second wall. I literally imagine myself crawling over that wall. The next time you get in, it's always the first wall. It's always a shock. And then you want to push that wall out to the next minute, then two minutes and three minutes. This can come with anything. You get to be doing a crossword puzzle on the plane. I don't like crossword puzzles, but every once in a while I'll force myself to do it. And you should finish it. It's in the finishing. And then you finish it,

and there's something so deeply satisfying about that. Even if it's something kind of trivial, even if it's folding your clothes, you know, a lot's been made of make your bed in the morning or fold your clothes or do the dishes. The next time you find yourself doing the dishes, do them really to completion, right? I have this habit of leaving the one thing because it's good enough, right?

Doing things to completion is a tremendous dopamine hit. And the more friction you feel, the more pain, the more reward you can expect. And this is what… Friction, pain, completion. Yeah. I just can't help myself. Yeah. Right.

And actually, it probably has roots in the challenge. You know, we have these challenges, too, as human beings. But for most species, mating is a very challenging thing. The males have to compete with one another. In most mammalian species, not every male gets to mate. A subset of them get to mate with the female sire, many, many offspring. And they have to fight in order to do it. Oftentimes they have to fight fasted, right?

They have to fight injured. So there's all sorts of this stuff. And the reason we can leap to an example like that from crossword puzzles and not be outside the lane lines is that reward, friction, pain, the pain-pleasure balance, there's one set of circuitries in the brain and body for that. It's the same one that existed 100,000 years ago. It's not different for weight training in the gym or the crossword puzzle or the exam in school.

Once you start seeing that those things are the same in terms of underlying neural process, then you start saying, oh, okay, I can apply this to pretty much anything. And then, of course, you have the agency to decide what you want to apply it to. So learn to be a finisher. This is really important. Learn to be a finisher and learn to take on things that are hard. And then, of course, bask in the dopamine that comes afterward. And then do it again and again.

And I think this is the kind of deeper layers of anything, whether or not you're talking about martial arts, weight training, academics, doesn't matter. It's all part of the same underlying process. What is hard is when people try something, they feel the friction, and then they stop. Now you're sending your brain the signal that quitting is actually, like you said, then they go reward themselves with a lower, lesser reward. And you're training your nervous system to be weak. But the good news is you can always fight your way back. All right. That's all the time we got.

Andrew Z, take us on out of here, buddy. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Make sure you guys are following the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram, at MP Power Project on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ. And Seema, where are you at? I'm at SeemaYinYang on Instagram and YouTube. I'm at SeemaYinYang on TikTok and Twitter.

Andrew? I'm at Huberman Lab for Huberman Lab Podcast. We're on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify. We come out with new episodes each week about science and science-related tools for everyday life. And on Huberman Lab at, where I teach science and little bits about health and fitness that you won't see on the podcast. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.